In a glowing underpass in Central Park one night last month,
a man and woman danced through a boxing routine. They skipped rope and sparred.
He swung and she ducked. Echoing through the space, playing on a cellphone, was
a piano composition by the Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona. It had the feel of a
dirge, possibly because Fidel Castro had died three
nights earlier.
“I still don’t want to accept it,” the trainer,
Brin-Jonathan Butler, said. “A year after from now, no one will believe it all
ever existed.”
Mr. Butler, 37, is among his generation’s foremost boxing
writers — the candidate pool for his anachronistic profession is admittedly
small — and his book, “The
Domino Diaries,” an immersion into Cuba’s boxing culture, positions him in
a line of literary acolytes of Ernest Hemingway. But being a
boxing writer now is a less viable career path than it was in Hemingway’s day,
and the exotic Havana he visited is becoming a popular Instagram destination
for JetBlue passengers.
So Mr. Butler makes ends meet by teaching boxing to a dozen or so clients
at $90 a session in Central Park, no matter the weather. “When I came to New
York, someone told me ‘You’re either rich or you have a second job,’” he said.
His book, which Picador published last year and recently
came out in paperback, recounts his trip to Cuba in 2000 with little more than
boxing gloves, a wad of cash and a vague plan to research Cuban boxing. He
ended up living there on and off for a decade. His small apartment in an East
Harlem walk-up is filled with tattered pictures of Che Guevara and Castro.
“Some people have a feeling home is not where you were born,” he said. “I felt
I’d come home when I went to Havana.”
For boxing fans, Cuba holds
an outsize mystique. Since Castro took power in 1959, the island has won
more Olympic gold
medals in boxing than any other country, but its fighters have for the most
part resisted the temptation to defect to the United States, turning down
multimillion-dollar offers in apparent loyalty to the revolution. Mr. Butler
found the paradox worth exploring, and his book argues that the sport is as
entwined with Cuba’s narrative of defiance toward America as much as anything
else.
Mr. Butler’s book “The Domino Diaries,” an immersion into
Cuba’s boxing culture, positioned him in a line of literary acolytes of Ernest
Hemingway.Creditvia Brin Jonathan Butler
His adventures over the years were plentiful. He interviewed
Cuba’s most decorated boxers, finding them living in poverty: Several had sold
their gold medals because they needed the money; another agreed to train him
for $6 a day, and another decreed he chug a glass of vodka as a test of
character. The book chronicles Mr. Butler’s fling
with one of Castro’s granddaughters and the time he bet his life savings
on a fight (he won). He also retraced Hemingway’s footsteps, talking his way
into his literary idol’s home and traveling to a small fishing town to find the
old man who inspired
“The Old Man and the Sea,” who was then 102.
These days, you can find him in Central Park. Another tune
started to play as his student agonized through push-ups. “You’d see these
boxers dominate at the Olympics, and then they’d just disappear,” he said.
“They were fighting for something more important than money. I had to go find
out why.”
Mr. Butler was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1979
and began boxing, he said, for the same reason everyone starts boxing. “When
you get into the ring, you think everyone’s there for a different reason than
you, but that’s not true,” he said. “It’s all the same reason: to reclaim
respect.” In his case, classmates violently ambushed him on an empty field when
he was 11. He retreated into reading Dostoyevsky and punching heavy bags.
He arrived in Havana when he was 20, around the time of
the Elián
González conflict. His book started writing itself on the plane. An antique
bookseller seated beside him claimed to know the location of Gregorio Fuentes,
the fisherman who inspired Hemingway; flight attendants had cut off the
bookseller from more alcohol, however, and he agreed to help only if Mr. Butler
ordered him more whiskey.
Soon after settling into Havana, Mr. Butler found himself
knocking on a door in the quiet fishing village of Cojímar, east of the
capital. He spent only 20 minutes with the wrinkled man who emerged. “He said
that after Hemingway committed suicide, he never fished again,” Mr. Butler
recalled. “He told me, ‘He was my friend, and I never wanted to fish again
after that.’” Mr. Fuentes died two years later.
John
Hemingway, one of Ernest Hemingway’s grandsons, became a fan of Mr.
Butler’s writing and started a correspondence with him. “I really liked a piece
he wrote about bullfighting in Spain, so I wrote him a letter,” Mr. Hemingway
said in a phone call. “Brin looks at the corrida as the art form we consider it
to be. We almost went to see José Tomás in Mexico City together. He’s the best
bullfighter in the world right now. Anyone who gets the chance to see him
before he retires or gets killed is in for a treat.”
Mr. Butler with Gregorio Fuentes, left, the inspiration for
the fisherman in Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” Creditvia
Brin-Jonathan Butler
But Mr. Butler spent most of his time in Cuba, living in a crumbling apartment on Neptune Street, exploring the thesis of his book. “Heroes weren’t for sale,” he wrote. “But how long could that last? How long could anyone resist not cashing in? And if no price was acceptable to sell out, what was the cost of that stance?”
He enlisted at Rafael
Trejo, a historic boxing gym in the city’s old red-light district, where
wrenches were banged against fire extinguishers as bells. “These old women
guarded the door,” he said. “They reminded me of the sisters from ‘Macbeth.’
You had to pay them $2 to enter, but then you trained outside under the stars
and punched tires instead of punching bags.”
Everything Mr. Butler thought he knew about boxing got
turned backward: At government-funded stadium matches, there were no cameras,
no concession stands, no corporate sponsorships, no ticket scalpers and no
V.I.P. seating. There was also no air-conditioning.
“Without the incentive of money, I watched people fight
harder than anywhere else I’d ever seen,” he wrote. “But I knew full well that
most Cuban champions were so desperate for money that many had sold off all
their Olympic medals, and even uniforms, to the highest tourist bidder. That
part of the Cuban sports legacy was omitted from their tales.”
He found his first Olympian, Héctor
Vinent, shortly after arriving. Mr. Vinent, who won Olympic gold medals in
the 1990s, started training Mr. Butler at the gym for $6 a session. Mr. Butler
then found Teófilo Stevenson, whom the BBC once described as
Cuba’s “most famous figure after Fidel Castro.” Mr. Stevenson became a Cuban
legend after winning three consecutive Olympic gold medals (’72, ’76,
’80) and turning down $5 million to fight Muhammad Ali in the United States. Tall
and strapping, his refusal to defect made him a potent symbol of the
revolution. When Mr. Butler found him, he was living in penury at 59, charging
$130 to be interviewed on camera at his Havana home. He died a year later.
“He turned down millions to leave, and here was begging for
$130 to talk about turning down millions,” Mr. Butler said. “He was the perfect
canary in the coal mine because his situation reflected the health of the
revolution.”
The cork board above Mr. Butler’s writing desk in
Harlem. CreditHilary Swift for The New York Times
The former champion was self-conscious of his living
conditions, Mr. Butler said, and initially requested that the camera focus on a
wall. He also made the unusual request, as it was 9 in the morning, that Mr.
Butler consume a tall glass of vodka to establish trust. The conversation
is believed to be the boxer’s last videotaped interview.
Mr. Butler also encountered Félix Savón and Guillermo
Rigondeaux. Mr. Savón was similarly elevated to heroic
status after winning three gold medals and refusing multimillion-dollar offers
to fight Mike Tyson. He is said to have told the boxing promoter Don
King, “What
do I need $10 million for when I have 11 million Cubans behind me?” And
when promoters came to his Havana home, Mr. Butler reported in his book, Mr.
Savón’s wife boasted, “Félix is more revolutionary than Fidel.”
Mr. Rigondeaux, on the other hand, broke ranks while Mr.
Butler was there, defecting
to the United States in 2009. Indications of his rebelliousness,
perhaps, were apparent when Mr. Butler encountered him: He claimed he had
melted his two Olympic gold medals to wear as grills on his teeth. The Ring magazine now
ranks him the No. 1 junior featherweight in the world.
Of course, Mr. Butler didn’t devote his every waking moment
to studying Cuba’s sports system. At a New Year’s Eve party in 2006, he met one
of Castro’s granddaughters. “She asked me for a cigarette,” he said. “She
seemed impressed I didn’t care who she was.” In an unusual gesture of
flirtation, she recited Castro’s personal phone number. A retelling of what
followed was published on the sports website Deadspin with the cheeky headline: “The
Time I Went to Havana and Hooked Up With Castro’s Granddaughter.”
He concluded his travels the same day Osama bin Laden was
killed in 2011. Even as he headed to the airport, he said, the nation’s
idiosyncrasies followed him. “No one in Cuba knew that he had been killed yet,”
he said. “I only found out because I ran into a New Yorker who was yelling to
everybody, ‘We got him!’ His hotel had a TV with an American news channel.”
In New York, a short-lived marriage ended in divorce. A
documentary he made about his adventures left him $50,000 in debt (he has
struggled to get the film released), and though “The Domino Diaries” received
good reviews, it sold poorly. But Mr. Butler didn’t linger on the financial
outcome of his travels. “J. D. Salinger said, ‘Write the book you want to
read,’ and I got to do that,” he said. “Writing about Cuba was an honor.”
Mr. Butler with Alix Kram for a training session. Credit Hilary
Swift for The New York Times
He prepped boxing gear at his East Harlem apartment before a
lesson in Central Park last month. His library is cluttered with books by
sportswriters like Jimmy Cannon and A. J. Liebling. A “private property” sign
he said he pried off a tree from Salinger’s property hangs on a wall. The
ticket to a fight at the Kid
Chocolate Arena in Havana is pinned above his desk alongside a picture
of a shirtless Castro doing a pull-up. His cat, Fidel, stared down from atop a
pile of books.
Mr. Butler is aware that he writes about a sport that
increasingly exists on the margins. “Fighters complain to me about boxing
writers now,” he said. “‘You guys aren’t as good as you used to be.’ And I say,
‘There’s not the money there used to be.’” He continued, “‘I’m on Medicaid, I’m
living below the poverty line, and I’m also in Vegas at the ring writing about
your fight.’”
And in Manhattan, boxing is a lonely sport to love when even
many of those he teaches cannot name the current heavyweight champion of the world.
He is something of a holdout in that sense and has become a walking repository
of the city’s boxiana.
The daughter of one the sport’s best writers, Mark Kram, is
a student of Mr. Butler’s; his coffee companion and confidant, Thomas Hauser,
is Ali’s official biographer; and he often passes Saturday evenings in the
boxing-memorabilia-filled apartment of a widow in Hamilton Heights who tapes
practically every televised fight. (“I can’t believe we paid $30 for that
miserable pay-per-view out of Puerto Rico,” she lamented as she and Mr. Butler
watched the recent Manny Pacquiao fight over wine and her homemade tacos.)
Mr. Butler calls his lessons “guerrilla style.” Of the trend
of boxing as fitness for “Wall Street guys,” he said: “They do it to feel
something. Anything. Boxing gyms are parks for rich people now. Black fighters
are exotic as trainers to them. Gyms aren’t the lifelines they were to kids
anymore.”
The gig is necessary to support his craft, he said, though
he has written lengthy literary articles for publications like the The Paris
Review, Esquire and ESPN the Magazine, and has been mentioned in the Best American
Sports Writing anthology three times. He is working on a book about
chess for Simon & Schuster. “I wrote well over a million words before I was
paid for one,” he said.
“I’m having to struggle and grind like the fighters I write
about,” he concluded. “That makes it easy for me to sympathize with them.”
But Mr. Butler tends to stay away from doom and gloom,
focusing on the tale at hand. Indeed, he brightened at the park when he thought
about Castro’s love for boxing. “He was a fanatic,” he said, starting to wind
up another story: Félix
Savón was battling the American boxer Shannon Briggs at the 1991
Pan-American Games. Castro was watching in the audience.
“Cuba is absolutely demolishing the U.S. in the ring,” Mr.
Butler said. “Everyone in the stadium starts doing the wave and Fidel jumps up
with them. Fidel Castro started doing the wave.”
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De THE NEW YORK TIMES, 15/12/2016
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